Chapter 76 - Blood in the White Room
Leah didn't hesitate. Securing the baby inside her coat with a strip of torn fabric, she grabbed the ladder rungs and began descending into the darkness.
"Take Maya," David barked to Dr. Vance.
"No, you go first! I can lock the hatch from—"
Vance never finished the sentence.
A high-velocity round punched through the steel door frame and tore through her chest. Vance gasped, her eyes turning glassy, and she tumbled forward across the threshold of the hatch, her blood cascading down into the vertical shaft.
David grabbed Maya with one arm and pulled his daughter against his chest, dropping through the opening just as a sustained hail of automatic gunfire shredded the upper chamber. Metal sparked and ricocheted inches above his head.
He caught the metal rung with his right hand, the violent jolt nearly dislocating his shoulder as his fingers burned against the cold iron. Maya screamed into his collar, her small arms wrapped around his neck with suffocating strength.
Above them, through the square opening of the hatch, Julian’s face appeared in the strobe of the red emergency lights.
Julian held a submachine gun pointed directly down the shaft. His porcelain skin was now mottled with dark, bursting vessels across his cheeks; his eyes were bloodshot, feral, the veneer of refinement entirely burned away by panic.
"You can't leave the mountain, David!" Julian roared over the screaming sirens. "The blood belongs here! If I die, you die with me!"
Julian squeezed the trigger.
David released his grip on the ladder.
They fell twelve feet through the gloom, crashing onto a pile of discarded insulation and galvanized ductwork at the bottom of the service trench. The impact knocked the wind from David’s lungs in an explosion of white stars, but his body absorbed the brunt of the fall, shielding Maya completely.
High above, Julian’s bullets clattered against the iron rungs and ricocheted uselessly against the concrete walls of the shaft.
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"David!" Leah’s voice cut through the dark. She was on her knees beside him, dragging him off the twisted metal. "David, can you stand?"
"I’m up," David wheezed, tasting copper in his mouth as he forced air back into his bruised lungs. He hoisted Maya to his feet. "We keep moving. He’s closing the bulkheads."
